Introducing: a very generalized solution for PHP 5.3+

I ‘d like to add my own solution here, since it offers features that other answers do not.

Specifically, advantages of this solution include:

It’s reusable: you specify the sort column as a variable instead of hardcoding it.

It’s flexible: you can specify multiple sort columns (as many as you want) — additional columns are used as tiebreakers between items that initially compare equal.

It’s reversible: you can specify that the sort should be reversed — individually for each column.

It’s extensible: if the data set contains columns that cannot be compared in a “dumb” manner (e.g. date strings) you can also specify how to convert these items to a value that can be directly compared (e.g. aDateTime instance).

It’s associative if you want: this code takes care of sorting items, but you select the actual sort function (usort or uasort).

Finally, it does not use array_multisort: while array_multisort is convenient, it depends on creating a projection of all your input data before sorting. This consumes time and memory and may be simply prohibitive if your data set is large.

Custom projections

In some scenarios you may need to sort by a column whose values do not lend well to sorting. The “birthday” column in the sample data set fits this description: it does not make sense to compare birthdays as strings (because e.g. “01/01/1980” comes before “10/10/1970”). In this case we want to specify how to project the actual data to a form that can be compared directly with the desired semantics.

Projections can be specified as any type of callable: as strings, arrays, or anonymous functions. A projection is assumed to accept one argument and return its projected form.

It should be noted that while projections are similar to the custom comparison functions used with usort and family, they are simpler (you only need to convert one value to another) and take advantage of all the functionality already baked into make_comparer.

Let’s sort the example data set without a projection and see what happens:

There are many more things that projections can achieve. For example, a quick way to get a case-insensitive sort is to use strtolower as a projection.

That said, I should also mention that it’s better to not use projections if your data set is large: in that case it would be much faster to project all your data manually up front and then sort without using a projection, although doing so will trade increased memory usage for faster sort speed.

Finally, here is an example that uses all the features: it first sorts by number descending, then by birthday ascending: